The Daughters of Mrs Peacock (10 page)

‘Well, my dears, did you enjoy yourselves?' asked Mrs Peacock, on the way home.

‘Yes, thank you, Mama,' said Sarah sleepily.

‘It was delicious,' murmured Catherine, smiling to herself.

‘And my Julia? Has she nothing to say?'

‘It was a lovely ball,' said Julia, ‘especially after supper. What a nice old gentleman the Colonel is. I danced with him twice. So clever of him, with only one arm, poor man. It's wonderful how he manages. Don't you think so, Papa?'

‘Yes, my dear. But we old gentlemen
are
wonderful. You have only to look at me. Here I am, still awake, at two o'clock in the morning.' He yawned prodigiously. ‘The countryside looks good, doesn't it, in moonlight. A pity we've got to go home. How would it be if we spent the rest of the night in the fields and watched the dawn in. What do you say, Emily?'

‘Do let's, Papa,' cried Catherine. ‘I'm sure I don't want to go to bed. I shan't sleep a wink.'

‘You're all tired out,' said Mrs Peacock, in a tone of great satisfaction, ‘and tomorrow you'll be fit for nothing. Your father and I had such a nice talk with young Mrs Beckoning. Didn't we, Edmund?'

‘Did we, my dear? Yes, I expect we did.'

‘So polite and unassuming. You'd never guess she was related to the peerage.'

‘Why, Mama? Is the peerage always rude?' asked Catherine.

‘So devoted to her children,' said Mrs Peacock. ‘It was pretty to see. And to the Colonel too, of course.'

‘Nice of her to include him in her regard,' remarked Mr Peacock, ‘seeing he's only her husband.'

‘Don't be naughty, Edmund. You know very well there must be nearly thirty years between them.'

‘Is that too much, Mama?' Catherine asked.

‘That,' said Mrs Peacock, primming her lips, ‘is not for us to say. If the Colonel chooses to have a second family, it is no one's business but his.'

‘Except, perhaps, his wife's,' suggested Edmund. ‘The Colonel, I hazard, is of Shakespeare's opinion, that a man should take a younger than himself so that he can shape her to his liking.'

‘How old, do you imagine, is Mr Crabbe, Papa?'

‘My imagination, Kitty, has not been engaged by that question. Why do you ask?'

‘Would you believe it,' said Catherine, ‘he danced three times running with that Mrs Stapleton. Is she, do you think, setting her widow's cap at him?'

‘Why not ask her, my love? I'm sure she would be happy to confide in you.'

Sarah, jerking awake, said drowsily: ‘Am I dreaming? Or are the horses really running away with us?'

The same idea had occurred to her father. He had been every moment expecting a protest from his wife. They were going downhill at a brisk pace, and the carriage swayed alarmingly. It had been evident, at the setting out, that Harry Dawkins's entertainment in
the servants' quarters had lacked nothing that could make a man merry while his betters were enjoying the ball; and now, but half way home, snatches of tuneless song put the matter beyond doubt.

Mr Peacock shouted to him to stop. It took some time for the command to penetrate his understanding, but at last he pulled hard on the reins and flung himself back, lifting the horses' forelegs three feet from the ground.

‘Sit tight, girls,' said Mr Peacock, alighting. ‘I'll handle this … Harry, what's come over you? Do you want to break all our necks?'

Harry met the inquiry with a beatific grin. He yammered a little but uttered no word.

‘Get down, man. I'll drive.'

‘All good fellows,' said Harry. ‘All jolly good fellows.' His eyes closed. His mouth hung open. His head drooped.

‘Disgraceful!' Mrs Peacock had joined her husband on the road. ‘I do believe the man's drunk.'

‘Your conjecture, my love, has much to commend it. Hi! Wake up. You're not in bed yet.' Prodding and shaking, he pulled the delinquent driver off his perch and set him, swaying precariously, on the ground. ‘Shall we have him inside?'

‘With the girls! Certainly not.'

‘Come along,' said Mr Peacock, taking his arm.

A glimmer of reason appeared in the fuddled eyes. ‘I dursn't, master. Not with the ladies. Twouldn't be right, look.'

‘Very proper sentiment, Harry. It does you credit,' said Mr Peacock. He led him to the grass verge and
persuaded him, with less than no difficulty, to lie down. ‘Sleep it off, boy. It's a warm night. You'll come to no harm.'

Seeing his wife safely bestowed again, he picked up the reins and got into the driver's seat.

‘Poor Harry,' said Sarah, as they drove off. ‘What a surprise he'll get when he wakes up!'

‘It's a very shocking thing to happen,' Mrs Peacock declared. ‘I shall ask your father to dismiss him.'

‘Oh, Mama,' protested Catherine, ‘would that be fair? We've had our fun. Why shouldn't he have his?'

‘I am not in the habit of arguing with you, Catherine. You know that.'

‘Yes,' agreed Sarah. ‘Kitty knows that, Mama.'

The journey continued in silence and without further incident. A quarter of an hour later they were home, and on their way to bed. At the head of the stairs, after the parents had gone to their room, the three girls lingered for a moment, all but overcome with sleepiness yet too excited to part without a few last words.

‘How did you get on with Captain Beckoning, Catherine?' Julia asked.

‘Oh, him!' Catherine made a grimace. ‘He kissed me, under the cedar. But you needn't worry,' she added, answering Julia's horrified look. ‘I didn't much care about it.'

Mr Peacock was not so uninterested in Robert Crabbe's personal life as it suited him to pretend. He had been surprised to see Mrs Stapleton at Manor Park and suspected that Robert had somehow contrived her invitation. He was not in the habit of minding other people's business—he left that, he would have told you, to the women—but here he felt himself to be professionally as well as personally concerned. Liking Robert Crabbe, he would be sorry to see him make a fool of himself. Nor did he relish the possibility of a scandal that might in the public mind become associated with his eminently respectable firm. He had therefore observed the growing friendship with misgiving, the more so because Robert maintained an impenetrable reserve about it. That the dear fellow should think of marrying again was natural enough. He had perhaps forty years ahead of him and could hardly be expected to remain a disconsolate widower for the rest of his life, living over the office and resorting to restaurants for all his major meals. But it was a moot point whether marriage was now in question; and if it were, thought Mr Peacock, no good could come of it with such a person as Mrs Stapleton.

He could not have said why, for it was a matter of principle with him to discount gossip and reject innuendo; but the fact remained that there was something about Olive Stapleton that attracted the wrong kind of man and made women in general fight shy of her. How then, since Robert was
not
the wrong kind of man, had she succeeded in attaching him? She lived, with two servants and a large-eyed little boy, in a small house on the outskirts of Newtonbury, having arrived there from nowhere a year or two ago. Mr Peacock, unlike some, resolutely believed her to be the widow she professed to be, and that the elderly gentleman of military aspect who visited her from time to time was her uncle. The ground of his distrust of her owed nothing, he told himself, to uncharitable rumours. It was simply that he did not like her face. Yet it was not an unhandsome face: all the constituents of beauty were there, except gentleness: in default of which she had developed, in early middle age, a boldly ingratiating manner and with men a cooing comehitherness that passed for playful. But though the lips smiled, with an effect of childish candour, the eyes remained cold, shrewd, watchful.

Robert Crabbe, in tribute to his bachelor condition, had a standing invitation to take Sunday luncheon with the Peacocks; and it had become an established routine that he should resort to them at least once a month. He was not a favourite with Mrs Peacock, his manner with her was too reserved, he was always the polite visitor; but this much attention was due to him as her husband's partner. She thought him deficient in small talk, resented Edmund's regard for him, was irritated by his
enthusiasm for Browning, that so difficult poet, so difficult and so different from dear Mr Tennyson, and suspected him of entertaining unsound opinions on religion, for he had once at luncheon mentioned the name Huxley without visible distaste. He was, in short, a somewhat mysterious character, and Mrs Peacock did not like what she did not understand. She discerned certain merits in him, allowed him intelligence and good manners, accepted her husband's judgment of his professional capacity, and saw that her younger daughters, if not Julia, found his conversation stimulating. Whether she liked it or not, he was an established friend of the family; and she resigned herself with a good grace to being unable to fit him into a pigeonhole.

It was the accepted thing that after luncheon the two men would take themselves off, to stroll round the farm together, it being out of the question that Edmund should forgo that weekly pleasure, and Robert being always eager to indulge him. Mrs Peacock, rising, would always say: ‘We shall meet again at teatime, I hope, Mr Crabbe?' And he, with a bow, would answer: ‘Thank you, Mrs Peacock. You are most kind.' But today, his first Sunday after the Manor Park affair, the ritual question evoked a different, an unprecedented response.

‘Forgive me, but I fear not. So very sorry. I have to be back at Newtonbury by four o'clock.'

Five pairs of astonished eyes were turned upon him, seeming to demand an explanation. He offered none. Edmund, cutting in on his wife's polite protest, said quickly: ‘Very well, my dear Robert. But you needn't go for half an hour. Come into my study and have a
talk.' He shepherded his womenfolk into the drawing-room and left them there.

The two men left behind them a speculative silence, which Catherine was the first to break.

‘I wonder if Papa will get it out of him,' she said: half to herself, half to Sarah.

‘Get what out of him?' asked Sarah.

‘Where he's going. Who he's going to see.'

‘Your father,' said Mrs Peacock, ‘is too much the gentleman to be inquisitive. I wish his daughters may take after him.'

‘Would you wish us to be gentlemen too, Mama?'

‘I would wish you to be ladies, Sarah, and not trouble your heads about what doesn't concern you. Mr Crabbe is not our property, remember. He comes and goes as he pleases.'

‘But he
always
stays for tea, Mama,' said Catherine. ‘Ever since I can remember, he has.'

‘You're young, my dear. Your memory is short. And why this sudden interest in Mr Crabbe, pray? You realize, I hope, that he's old enough to be your father?'

‘Is he really, Mama?' asked Sarah, who knew he was not. ‘And ought that to make him less interesting to us? Kitty's like me. She prefers old gentlemen. Young men are so insipid, aren't they, Kitty?'

‘I said nothing about old gentlemen, Sarah. You deliberately twist my words.'

‘I didn't mean to, Mama. For my part I like Mr Crabbe, however old he is. Why don't you marry him, Kitty? I daresay he'll have you if you ask him. He'll read Browning to you in the long winter evenings.
Think of that.' Seeing with astonishment the beginnings of a blush in Catherine's cheeks she hastened to add: ‘Or perhaps Julia ought to as, she's the eldest.'

‘That's enough, Sarah. Your jokes go too far. They are very unsuitable, especially on the Lord's Day.'

‘I'm sorry, Mama.' Sarah refrained from asking whether the Lord had no sense of humour. It was a question that sometimes seriously exercised her.

Catherine contrived to be out of the room when Mr Crabbe returned to take formal leave of Mrs Peacock: a circumstance that made it imperative, she argued, that she should join him and her father in the yard, watch him mount, and wave good-bye to him. He looked well on a horse: easy, upright, quietly masterful. His hired nag was restive almost to friskiness, but he handled her expertly and with style. ‘Steady, girl! Steady!' His long grave face relaxed into a smile. His voice was dark and gentle.

But for her father's presence Catherine would have spoken to him, to make him aware of her. She wanted to ask him if he would lend her a book, one of his many books, whether Browning or another, that she might learn to share his interests and improve her butterfly mind. A month ago, had such an impulse moved her, she would not have hesitated to announce her request in full view and hearing of the whole family. What had happened to her that she should shy away from so simple a thing? And what made her, in the total absence of evidence, so sure that it was Olive Stapleton's steel-bright eyes and avid mouth that were drawing him untimely back to Newtonbury? As he rode away, transfigured by her
fancy into the semblance of a dashing cavalier, she was glad that he had chosen that form of locomotion in preference to his newly acquired boneshaker, ingenious amusing but unromantic machine, and that he had refrained from disturbing her mother by using the railway. Railway-travel on Sunday, because it involved human labour, was a thing Mrs Peacock disapproved of (horses, having no souls, did not matter), and Catherine, for no conscious reason, was anxious that he should do nothing to incur the maternal displeasure.

‘Why did he have to go so early, Papa?' asked Catherine, as they turned towards the house.

‘I can only suppose, my dear, that he had another engagement.'

‘Didn't you ask him?' said Catherine, artfully artless.

‘No, Catherine. I did not. One doesn't catechize one's friends.'

‘I do,' said Catherine lightly. ‘Specially my friends. With others it would be rude, but not with friends. Not catechize exactly, but I ask questions if I want to know something. It seems the simplest way to find out. Is that wrong, Papa?'